Towards near real time carbon budgets

We provide a framework to deliver frequently updated estimates of greenhouse gases emissions and removals for each country and key sectors, constrained by Earth Observations, including quantification of uncertainties related to each country's characteristics (e.g. forest cover, importance of land use change, role of methane emissions). By combining observable components of individual CO2 fluxes and ecosystem C stock changes, we show that it is possible to quantify the budget of these three greenhouse gases with a low latency at national and even sub-national scales and from the ocean, including differentiation of natural and anthropogenic fluxes for the period 2000-2023, with a focus on the distribution of flux anomalies during the year 2023 that was associated with record high temperatures and developing El Niño in the second half of the year. Developing near real-time estimates would transform our ability to track changes of emissions separately over unmanaged and unmanaged lands, to assess trends of deforestation emissions and carbon losses from ecosystem disturbances, and makes it possible to identify emissions hotspots for prioritising mitigation actions.